7 ways to leverage the power of silence
Find new possibilities in your work, workouts, and life.
Post summary
A confession: We can’t actually find silence.
But some strange and beneficial things happen when we try.
Altering your soundscape can open up new possibilities in your fitness routine, productivity, creativity, and make you a little less crazy.
We’ll cover the true science of silence and seven powerful ways to leverage its power.
Housekeeping
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Audio/podcast version
The post
On Monday, we covered the benefits of silence.
That post summarized: Humans evolved in silence, but we’ve recently increased the world’s loudness fourfold and this noise is linked to stress, poor health outcomes, and decreased focus and learning. In our loud and modern world, finding a bit of silence can be very good for us.
But how do you actually find silence?
First, some bad news: You can’t.
Silence is nowhere. That’s what theoretical physics tells us, anyway. Even the quietest places are inundated with white noise, the sound electromagnetic waves make as they travel through space.
White noise can exist even in the vacuum of outer space. You may not hear it, but white noise is engulfing you right now.
Four silent places
The closest you can get to silence is in a drab gray building on 2709 East Twenty-Fifth Street in Minneapolis, Minnesota, across from a city park and an old liquor store.
Or inside boxy buildings in the middle of the desert between Bakersfield and Barstow, up the road from an Advanced Autoparts in Ayer, Massachusetts, or on the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division in Southern Maryland.
These places all hold anechoic chambers, which are completely silent rooms. The inside contains a platform for standing, and the walls, ceiling, and floor are layered in sound-killing foam cones. They’re the quietest places on earth.
The truth about silence
I spoke with Bob Orefield, who owns and runs the aforementioned anechoic chamber in Minneapolis.
When people first enter the chamber, they feel uncomfortable with the silence, Orfield told me. The lack of noise is a sensation unlike any they’ve had. “But then people start to calm down,” he said.
People become progressively more pacified as their perception of sound recalibrates and begins to settle. Then they reach the 30- minute mark.
“That’s when people start to hear the sounds their ears make,” said Orfield. “Then they hear their heart beat, and the joints in their arms and legs moving. Some people hear the flowing in their lungs and the blood from their carotid artery spreading into their brain. People go into the chamber thinking they’re going to hear silence. But what they get is the sound of themselves.” Silence is nowhere, indeed.
Sound reveals itself
Why is it that once we’re close to silence we start to hear more and different things?
Two Percent reader Kyle Shepard got his doctorate in audiology—the study of hearing and balance—and now works as an officer and audiologist at (you guessed it) the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division in Southern Maryland. He works with an anechoic chamber.1
He wrote in a Substack post:
Our brain is very good at ignoring noise that we understand and don’t find contextually significant. Introduce sounds we aren’t familiar with, believe to be important, or find distracting, and the mind has a hard time filtering them out regardless of loudness level. This is useful for threat identification, speech detection, and other signals that support situational awareness.
I followed up with him and asked him why other noises reveal themselves when we turn down the noise. He told me this:
There are so many sounds in our body that we either don’t hear or recognize from habituation, or due to other sounds in our environment. When we remove all other stimuli, we begin to hear the sounds of digestion, heart beating, blood pumping, respiration, and ringing in the ears (tinnitus). Typically, these come on slowly and, in many ways, begin to make the chamber sound “louder” because the sounds in our body now are technically louder than the environment. Signal-to-noise ratio is a term we often use—an intended (or unintended) signal needs to be a certain level above background noise for us to perceive it. Changing the signal and/or background noise can modulate its significance.
Altering your soundscape—that signal-to-noise ratio—can lead to revelations and ways of perceiving and being in the world. Stress goes down, hearing “resets,” interesting new ideas show themselves, and much more.
Here are seven practices I’ve used to alter my soundscape and change my perception of noise and silence. They’ve improved my fitness routine, productivity, creativity, and made me a little less crazy.